Glasvegas - 2008/09 Tour Dates (Bowery Ballroom)

GLASVEGAS > Kaiser Chiefs

I wonder if Paul Rudd will be there again?

Who the fuck cares > Hipster Stupidity

This is a can't miss show. No doubt.

Did they get a new drummer yet?

They really need to ditch the female Pete Best and get a Ringo.

Agreed. This band will never make it in the US until they:

1. change their name

2. Sack their drummer

tickets are on AMEX presale. The non-richies will have to wait until Friday, it seems.

you have to be rich to have an amex? i had one before. actually i might be rich. but i'm cheap enough to download their track for free on iTunes this week!

Hey stupid hipster scumb from Williamsburg...shut up. If you don't like the band, don't buy tickets. Just remember to have mommy and daddy drop that rent check the first of the month.

i'm poor with no job and bad credit and they gave me a gold amex. either way i bought 4 tickets!

Awful, awful band. After The Fratellis, now we're pushing Glasgvegas on the world? It's like the A&R scumbags in Scotland will sign any shite pub band with a bad myspace spamming habit.

First, a question: what is the point of rock’n’roll? There are as many answers as there are people to ask, but surely one essential tenet is that great rock affirms life. Which brings us to ‘Stabbed’, one of the most unsettling moments on Glasvegas’ astounding debut. In it, James Allan recounts a flight from a tooled-up gang in a half-dead monotone, muttering, “No cavalry could ever save me/I’m gonna get stabbed”, over reverb-ghostly piano. How many people are hunched knit-browed over notebooks right now, trying to write songs about ‘broken Britain and knife culture and that’? Well, they’ve all been rendered pointless by this, which knowingly echoes The Shangri-Las’ ‘Past, Present And Future’ in its borrowing of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’. A piece written by the world’s most famous composer while he was slowly going deaf, appropriated by a bunch of rough-edged dreamgirls to make a teenage melodrama of crushed hearts, reappropriated by a 20-something Glaswegian for a topical-yet-timeless evocation of terror that, in its humanisation of a social problem, somehow offers hope. That, my friends, is pop music at work.

And that’s nowhere near the best song on the album. From the off, ‘Flowers & Football Tops’ grabs you by the throat: huge space and reverb lend power to spare instrumentation, stock “wooah wooah”s and “baby”s twisted to fit the raw and real pain of a mother deprived of her son by violence. Then there’s ‘Go Square Go’, the artery-pumping surge of guitar perfectly conjuring the adrenaline rush of an imminent childhood kicking. ‘Perfect’ is a word that keeps springing to mind, yet one of Glasvegas’ great strengths is that they’re forged from imperfection. Rather than seek out the tightest drummer on the Glasgow scene and the most seasoned guitarist, James Allan chose a girl he met in a shop and his cousin.

As a result, they have the do-or-die gang mentality of all great bands. That knack of using the near-to-hand and commonplace to fashion a watertight aesthetic also feeds into Allan’s lyrics. At first, his repeated use of nursery-rhyme motifs jars, but on further listening you realise each is tightly woven into its context. Most heartbreakingly so in ‘Flowers & Football Tops’, where the refrain from ‘You Are My Sunshine’ lingers, subtly wrenching, on the “sun” syllable. ‘It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry’, meanwhile, deftly threads in a lyric from fellow working-class romantics Oasis as the narrator goes about his conquests. “It’s all about going out and getting pissed with eagle eyes/And sincerity bottom on my list/What’s the story morning glory?/I feel so low and worthless”, howls Allan, before the torrential finale cleanses his self-disgust. But unlike Oasis, Glasvegas are a social band: they sing about their city’s troubles, tour prisons and dedicate their first award to the murdered local teen who inspired ‘Flowers…’.

Their most socially aware songs, ‘Geraldine’ and ‘Daddy’s Gone’, remain as astounding as at first listen. The former rips through a classic indie-rock template to the raw guts underneath by the sheer force of Allan’s retching-up-his-soul delivery and its genius subject matter: who else could write a song about a social worker and make it sound like your soul ascending to heaven? ‘Daddy’s Gone’ similarly still stuns with its frank but never mawkish sense of abandonment. That Allan keeps it out of the melodramatic mire it could be (at risk of a hack-lynching, compare it with Lennon’s ‘Mother’) is to his credit.

What makes the album so sonically perfect is the contrast between the grandeur of Rich Costey’s big New York production, the simplicity of the songs and the immediacy of their Dion & The Belmonts-via-Dalmarnock inflections. Of course, they’re hardly the first to take doo-wop and girl-group sounds and add a bit of noise and echo. What sets them apart from bands ploughing similar furrows (like The Raveonettes) is their resistance to stylised retro references in favour of something much more human.

So believe it: this is the real thing, no-one’s crying wolf, not even Alan McGee. There’s not enough hype in the world for Glasvegas. They are an important, amazing, real band that won’t let you down. Not because they play real instruments and sing real songs about real people (they’d be just as genuine if they wrote noise collages about interstellar seahorses on MacBooks); they’re real because they put their entire hearts and souls and brains into it. And that is rock’n’roll.

I really really love this band.
They are the best band I have heard in Fo-evah. The frateleez were NOTHING compared to glasvegas. Music is great.

"Hey stupid hipster scumb from Williamsburg...shut up. If you don't like the band, don't buy tickets. Just remember to have mommy and daddy drop that rent check the first of the month."

Man. Isn't this joke worn out yet?

That joke NEVER gets old. Well said.

Yeah hipsters suck.

DIE.

does anyone actually know someone who lives in williamsburg and has their mommy and daddy pay their rent? i know i've heard that joke a lot but i don't think i've heard of that. i bet there's more in the lower east side getting that treatment...

I know a ton of people from Williamsburg that live off their parent. I'm sure the same is true for people in the lower east side as well.

Collective 401k for Williamsburg prior to stock market crash...$7.24.

Nearly every girl sporting designer treads in the 18-25 age range in Williamsburg has their rent paid by their parents. Fact.

that's what they are an NME hype band. and don't you know NME only pushes trash? :/

They also got a nice major label to shove them into every pore of the musical ignorant who will praise anything that NME says is gold, when in fact it's fools gold.

Let's hope american don't bite on this one... or maybe they are waiting for a Pitchfork review... I don't think they've had one yet. I'm expecting them to do this album justice, tank it so we can move on with our lives.

It also appears they've got this blog's email on their speedy bookmark, cause this is the only place that talks about them!

(if you hadnt noticed)

Glasvegas' debut LP has an '83' on Metacritic, denoting 'Universal Acclaim' from critics.

So... fail.

well if metacritic says so...

Who cares if they "make it here" or not. If you like their music that is all that matters. Record sales are for stockholders and record company executives. It shouldn't influence you as a listener.

"It's not about selling records, it's about being real." - Liam Gallagher on TRL (2000)

^^^Your heart is in the right place but believe me, the band cares...that's who. Record sales (and ipod commercials) are also for the bands themselves.

Point is as a listener who gives a fuck? Arcade Fire don't sell shit yet we all still love them. How many records did Neutral Milk Hotel or Slanted and Enchanted sell? 800 copies combined? Doesn't matter. The music is brilliant.

Word up! Pavement rocks and in the mid 90s you could probably pay them $50 to play your basement. I think even today you could get the Black Lips to perform in ones basement for $20 and a case of beer.

It is a scientific fact that every 100,000 records sold, the album itself sounds better! Example...Nickelback. Their last album sold 7 million copies. It sounded like shit when first released. One of the worst CDs containing musical notes. Now? Huge Christmas seller and in every Walmart across this country.

Remember Creed? Same thing.

Even Jesus hates Creed!

I'd personally like to see a concert lineup of the following....Glasvegas....Kasabian....Oasis.

Bring it.

Shoot the runner, shoot shoot the runner!

Kasabian are amazing. Looking forward to their new album and US tour. Great British band that has balls unlike Coldplay, Keane and Snow Patrol.

...and sold out

General onsale isn't until tomorrow Rtard.

Fuck you

GLASVEGAS BABY! ROCK ON! OR FUCK YOU!

Daddy's Gone, Geraldine and It's My Own Cheating Heart are killer tunes. Better than most shit people on these boards listen to.

Alan McGahee = Genius

I heard they will be playing several cuts from their Christmas album. Neat.

I wish the Stone Roses would reunite and rock Bowery for 5 nights straight. Dreaming....................................................

updated US dates

1/4/09 Great Scott Boston, MA
1/6/09 Bowery Ballroom New York, NY
1/8/09 Popscene San Francisco, CA
1/10/09 Chop Suey Seattle, WA
1/11/09 Richards on Richards Vancouver, ON
1/12/09 Doug Fir Lounge Portland, OR
1/14/09 Troubador Los Angeles, CA

The Glassholes are the shitest band in the entirety of rock and roll.